The Politics Of Paranoia

by: Kim Weissman
July 27, 2003

It
has been observed that when leftists are out of power they become truly
wacky – one might add, hysterical. But the danger posed by the
extremist left to this country is no laughing matter. The present most
visible target of their hatred is President Bush, but their venom is
broad enough to encompass all conservatives. Their rhetoric has become
truly despicable, and it bears reflecting on some of it. Comparing
President Bush to Adolf Hitler is a favorite theme of the left these
days. Witness the following from a February CounterPunch
editorial, and the Wall Street Journal’s
publication of part of an exchange about that piece:

“Muslim fanatics is exactly what Bush needs to stay in
power, win re-election in 2004, stack the federal courts, gut the Bill
of Rights, and enrich its corporate sponsors. … It's going a bit far to
compare the Bush of 2003 to the Hitler of 1933. Bush simply is not the
orator that Hitler was. But comparisons of the Bush Administration's
fear mongering tactics to those practiced so successfully and with such
terrible results by Hitler and Goebbels on the German people and their
Weimar Republic are not at all out of line.” – CounterPunch,
by David Lindorff, February 1, 2003.

“Dave Lindorff, the guy who wrote the original
Bush-Hitler piece, has now weighed in with a defense of sorts:

‘As one of the first to notice some similarities
between Bush II and the early Hitler, I didn't actually say that George
and Adolf were joined at the hip. Indeed, I suggested…that our
unelected president was surely no Hitler, since Bush simply is not the
orator that Hitler was. … While he has rounded up some Arab and Muslim
men purely because of their ethnicity or religion, Bush has not started
gassing them – at least not yet.’” – Wall Street Journal
– July 21, 2003.

But the Bush-as-Hitler and Bush-as-tyrant slanders do
not come just from the fringes on the left. An emeritus professor of
politics at Princeton University wrote (think about the sort of
anti-American hatred that our education dollars are supporting – the
hatred preached in many Mosques and religious schools in the Middle
East is only slightly more extreme than similar sentiments voiced in
many of our own institutions of “higher” education):

“Like previous forms of totalitarianism, the
Bush administration boasts a reckless unilateralism that believes the
United States can demand unquestioning support, on terms it dictates;
ignores treaties and violates international law at will; invades other
countries without provocation; and incarcerates persons indefinitely
without charging them with a crime or allowing access to counsel. …the
White House promoted tax cuts in the midst of recession, leaving scant
resources available for domestic programs. The effect is to render the
citizenry more dependent on government…”.

This professor is frantic at what he sees as the
institution of a single-party political system – conveniently ignoring
the Democrat one-party political system that dominated American
politics for decades. He illogically laments reduction of domestic
programs that nonetheless somehow causes increased dependency on those
very programs, conveniently ignores the fact that the entire thrust of
the left-wing agenda has always been precisely that – increasing
dependency on government – and he writes as though government
dependency is something the left opposes. The Princeton professor ends
his tirade with the following: “Perhaps the just-passed anniversary of
the Declaration of Independence might remind us that ‘whenever any form
of Government becomes destructive ...’ it must be challenged.”

Princeton is not the only institution of “higher”
education attempting to put a gloss of academic respectability on
slanderous hate-mongering. The University of California at Berkeley
weighed in with the following, parading as a psychological analysis:

“…there is the ‘conservative paradox’ of
right-wing revolutionaries, such as Hitler [note as a matter of
historical accuracy that the proper name of Hitler’s party, Nazi, was
“National Socialism” – not
National Conservatism] or Mussolini or Pinochet, who seem to advocate
social change in the direction of decreased egalitarianism. … There are
also cases of left-wing ideologues who, once they are in power,
steadfastly resist change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism,
such as Stalin or Khrushchev or Castro. It is reasonable to suggest
that some of these historical figures may be considered politically
conservative…”.

Note how Stalin, Khrushchev, and Castro, by anybody’s rational
definition socialists and communists – the ideologies so beloved by the
left – are transmuted by Berkeley into “conservatives” as soon as they
gained power and began their murderous and oppressive regimes.
Socialism and communism – the ideologies so beloved by the left – can’t
possibly be seen as inherently
murderous or oppressive, because if one were to accept the inherently
murderous and oppressive nature of those ideologies, one would also be
forced to acknowledge the oppressive intent of the leftists who endorse
those ideologies.

In a press release about this “study”, a Berkeley media
relations flak observed,

“Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald
Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because
they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in
some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way.”

The hate-mongering on the left is by no means confined
to ivory tower academicians. The formerly respectable NAACP managed to
combine the currently fashionable Nazi slander with their obsession
about the antebellum South and the Confederacy. At their recent
convention, Julian Bond was quoted as accusing the Republican Party of
"appealing to the dark underside of American culture. Their idea of
reparations is to give war criminal Jefferson Davis a pardon. Their
idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika
flying side by side.”

Bill Moyers, the PBS commentator, has engaged in
numerous rants against Bush, at least once using his taxpayer funded
megaphone (more evidence, should any more be needed, that the so-called
“public” broadcasting system is an anachronistic dinosaur that has
outlived its reason for existence); and the rest of the media has
jumped on the Bush-as-Hitler bandwagon. CBS is producing a TV movie
titled Hitler: The Rise of Evil, and TV Guide writes
that “Hitler’s grab for power in Germany in the 1930s is a cautionary
tale for contemporary America.” The executive producer proclaimed, “It
basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who
ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole
world into war. I can’t think of a better time to examine this history
than now.”

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace prize laureate and Holocaust
survivor (a man who actually knows something about Hitler and tyranny,
unlike the ignorant dilettantes on the left who heap endless praise on
tyrants like Fidel Castro) said “You can be against the war or for the
intervention [in Iraq]. But to compare America to Germany under Hitler
– no, really, it's almost unworthy of anger, because it's beyond the
pale.” Wiesel, incidentally, powerfully supported the intervention in
Iraq:

“Had Europe's great powers intervened
against Adolf Hitler's aggressive ambitions in 1938 instead of
appeasing him in Munich, humanity would have been spared the
unprecedented horrors of World War II. … We have a moral obligation to
intervene where evil is in control. Today, that place is Iraq.”

Members of Congress have joined in the hate-fest: “This
republic is at its greatest danger in its history because of this
administration”, said Senator Robert Byrd. Bush's economic policy is
the “most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since
socialism”, ranted Senator John Edwards – and this guy is considered
one of the more moderate democrats running for
president! And former Attorney General Janet Reno liked the
Bush-as-Hitler rant so much that, in a speech to democrats, she
recalled her visit to the Dachau concentration camp and reminded
everyone that the Holocaust happened because Germans just stood by.
“And don't you just stand by”, she exhorted the crowd.

The left has long tried to stamp out what they call
“hate speech”, which in their world usually means any speech that
criticizes any of their own cherished ideas. According to the left,
there is very little difference between “hate speech” and actual
physical violence; and politically correct speech codes abound on
college campuses, aimed at preventing the utterance of any words that
simply might offend someone.

Clearly, analogizing President Bush to Adolf Hitler and
conservatives to Nazis is highly offensive, and just as clearly these
slanderous words constitute hate speech, and thus by left-wing
standards, violence or near-violence. But in the real world words are
not conduct, and there has already been enough confusion sowed in our
legal system by conflating the two – such as the Supreme Court
affording First Amendment protection for conduct such as flag burning
by defining it as “symbolic speech”, leading to the entirely logical
demand to afford similar protection to cross burning and offensive
“performance art”.

The left’s vilification of their political opponents has
become wildly extreme and offensive, and it has been mirrored by a
pattern of deceit and disinformation from their friends in the media
that far exceeds the normal level of distortion and propaganda in which
the media normally engages. Just look at the distorted media reporting
on the Iraq war and its aftermath – so bad that many commentators are
warning that the disinformation poses a positive danger to future of
peace in the Middle East.

At the root of all this is a circumstance that the left
has not known for generations – the utter lack of political power in
either the Legislative or Executive branches of government – and that
has engendered a rampant paranoia on the left and in the media. Most
cultural institutions are still reliably left-wing and, along with the
media, have swung into action to overturn what they see as this
abnormal state of affairs. Even the Judiciary, which the left has
counted on for so long to impose an agenda on the nation that the left
never could have won consensually through majority-supported
legislation, can no longer be relied upon to institute the left’s
agenda by fiat.

Case in point: In May a federal court jury in New York,
in the lawsuit filed by the NAACP against firearms manufacturers,
decided that most of the companies were not liable and deadlocked on
the rest. But the jury’s role was advisory only, and the judge was free
to – and was widely expected to – ignore the jury’s advice and find
against the manufacturers. But this week the judge (“said to be one of
the most liberal jurists on the federal bench” according to the Washington
Times) confounded expectations and dismissed the lawsuit (but
still denounced the manufacturers for engaging in careless practices).
The left’s last-gasp attempt to hold on to the judiciary explains their
unprecedented filibusters of any Bush judicial nominees suspected of
being in the slightest bit conservative – that is, committed to
interpreting the Constitution as written, rather than usurping the role
of legislators and imposing their own agenda.

We are still more than a year away from the next
election, and the left’s propaganda machine is already running at fever
pitch. The spirit of liberty demands that we keep a watchful eye to
preserve our freedom.